London round-up: Rhinoceros, Playfight, Container
I went to London, saw some shows and had some thoughts.
I’m back in Belgrade this week, where the sun is out (and so are the students, this is a protest movement that shows no signs of slowing down).
I’ve recently been working on a piece for The Stage demystifying rights and licensing. What are the most popular plays performed by amateur groups in the UK? Why is Canadian musical Ride the Cyclone so huge with schools groups? It’s in this week’s issue, and was a really interesting piece to research. I particularly enjoyed talking to agent Alan Brodie about what it means to represent a writer’s estate.
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Rhinoceros, Almeida Theatre
Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros is performed far more in continental Europe than in the UK. The last major London staging was Dominic Cooke’s 2007 production for the Royal Court starring a young-ish Benedict Cumberbatch. Now Omar Elerian, who was last at the Almeida Theatre with Ionesco’s The Chairs, a production which was basically a showcase for the physical comedy of Kathryn Hunter and her husband Marcello Magni, returns to the north London theatre with another Ionesco text, his 1959 play about a small French town in which everyone gradually turns into a rhinoceros. Widely seen as a critique of post-war fascism, it can also be read – as Elerian explained when I spoke to him about the play – as a play about all forms of conformity.
The Lecoq-trained Elerian clearly loves clowning as a form. In The Chairs he had Magni and Hunter, here he has Told By an Idiot’s Paul Hunter and Hayley Carmichael, the former acting as a kind of MC/provocateur reading every one of Ionesco’s detailed stage directions and leading the audience through a kind of party game where we are asked to mimic his movements.
Initially the cast wear matching white lab coats with their hair in various wild cloud formations (Carmichael appears to be sporting a cumulonimbus on her head). The exception is Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù’s schlubby, put-upon Berenger, a man who just wants to keep his head down and get on with his life, but who ends up becoming a figure of reluctant resistance. While everyone else is a human cartoon with outsize gestures and Professor Calculus hair, he plays the character in a more naturalistic way, mumbling and downbeat. As it becomes apparent his fellow citizens are becoming rhinos, a process which is depicted as part contagion, part capitulation.
The production comes across as a kind of love letter to the text. While it includes a few parachuted-in and arguably unnecessary references to billionaires in charge of departments of efficiency, jokes about Gary Lineker and quotes from Kenneth Tynan about Ionesco’s anti-realism, it’s otherwise very faithful with Elerian putting his trust in the material (even if this does mean we get a lot of tiresomely circular conversations with logicians). The production’s aware in a meta way that some of these scenes drag on for a bit, but this does not stop them from dragging.
Sound plays a big role in Elerian’s production, with Foley sound effects inventively created at the side of the stage. The production also makes a big play of its own artifice and construction. A watermelon stands in for a cat, with the inevitable happening when the cat gets splatted by a rhino. The rhinos are initially evoked via collective stamping of feet, later by kazoos, which are distributed to audience members at the interval so we can join in the kazoo chorus (I didn’t get a kazoo so got to sit-out this exercise in musical groupthink).
Dìrísù has the difficult job of playing a glum, somewhat beaten-down individual surrounded by performances dialled up to eleven for comedic effect. He sits shoulders-slumped, immune to the mugging around him, an absence as much as a presence. Joshua McGuire’s screeching, writhing metamorphosis into a rhino in a shiny silver leotard complete with tail is a superb bit of physical comedy, but like a lot of things in the production it feels a bit overextended. The same can be said of the moment when Anouskha Lucas, as Daisy, the girl with whom Berenger is in love, sings in Italian, while snarky subtitles chide us for searching for meaning. Both are excellent, I should add; the whole ensemble is cracking. Hunter and Carmichael are old hands at this kind of stuff and even though she has less to do than some of the others I always enjoy seeing Sophie Steer on stage.
The sprightly, winking tone remains in place until relatively near the end, an approach that has pissed off some critics and delighted others. The moment when the text calls on Berenger to slap Daisy and the audience are invited to supply the sound effect, really feels like it should be grimmer than it is, only in the last few moments, as Berenger is roused into a state of despair and defiance, does it become genuinely unsettling. Dìrísù continues to roar hoarsely even as the show is seemingly over. I wish the production had leaned further into this and made it even more uncomfortable, maybe even done away with the curtain call altogether and let him rail and rail and rail until the theatre was empty.
Playfight, Soho Theatre
Three girls sit under a tree. The tree is their place. It’s where Zainab, Lucy and Keira, a trio of school friends about to sit their GCSEs and embark on the next phase of their lives, go to hang out, which largely involves talking about sex, whether or not they’re having it and with whom. Julia Grogan’s Playfight brilliantly captures the texture of teenage female friendship, the interplay of anxiety, confidence, confusion, and intensity. In some ways this is classic coming-of-age terrain, except the girls are coming of age in a world of readily available internet porn and Grogan deftly and subtly shows how this shapes their expectations.
Zainab is studious, Lucy thinks about God a lot (and hot choir boys), while Keira is the most outgoing of the three. Grogan – who is also one third of collective Dirty Hare, as discussed in this interview with Fergus Morgan’s The Crush Bar – is really, really good at sketching in the girls’ differing backgrounds and home lives without spelling things out. We get a real sense of the different pressures they face, and their differing understandings of where their lives might end up. In a different play, the influence of porn on the girls and their understanding of sex would have been pushed to the fore, but here it’s one factor among many, part of a larger tapestry including family and faith. Kiera makes some extra catch flogging pictures of her feet on Only Fans. Zainab slowly wakes up to the fact she quite likes girls and has feelings for Lucy that go deeper to friendship. Lucy seems to be developing a liking for masochism.
The cast - Nina Cassells, Lucy Mangan and Sophie Cox – really nail the girl’s contrasting personalities. They fully inhabit that weird teetering space between girlhood and womanhood, as well as capturing the sense these girls have been friends for ages. They can reveal things to one another that they can’t to anyone else. There’s a real candle-flame quality to their interactions, an understanding that life will sound drag them in different directions. They know this too, but Cox, as the bolshie Kiera, sometimes seems to feel it more keenly.
The play started life in Paines Plough’s Roundabout, a pop-up in-the-round theatre, and Emma Callander’s pacy production retains the dynamism of that space even in a more conventional theatre. Hazel Low’s set, a hot pink ladder standing in for a tree, nestled in a bed of playground wood chips, creates a focal point and, when the trio break into a chorus of Make me a Channel of Your Peace, I was so thoroughly transported back to my school assembly hall I could almost taste the weird butterscotch stuff they used to serve at lunch time. While it contains a few overwrought, mostly tree-related passages, Grogan’s dialogue is a delight, lyrical in places, particularly when describing the girls’ experience of intimacy, the flooding, fizzy feeling of being attracted to someone, but with a proper understanding of how to deliver a real snort-gasp-laugh punchline.
The play makes a last quarter swerve into tragedy which while far from unseeded doesn’t feel wholly organic. It’s the place where you can most clearly see Grogan’s interest in the mainstreaming of sexual choking among young people – as discussed in this Guardian piece – but, even so, it remains a compelling portrait of teenage friendship in all its heat and complexity, as well as the role that porn plays in shifting sexual mores.
Container, New Diorama
Container is an attempt to capture a sensation, the sense of overwhelm that comes from living in a world where, as Buffy once said, we find ourselves needing to know the plural of apocalypse. It’s a piece about bombardment and burnout, the feeling of living in a time of intersecting crises.
Alan Fielden’s show is an intriguing, non-narrative hybrid that straddles gig theatre and recital, a polyphonic fusion of voices and sounds. Fielden, who in 2018 won the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award as part of the collective JAMS, performs alongside Jemima Yong, Tim Cape, Ben Kulvichit and Clara Potter-Sweet (the latter two of Emergency Chorus) on a stage dotted with music stands and musical instruments against a curtain of blue polythene strips (beautifully lit by Kulvichit).
The text is an exercise in repetition. One section consists of a list of things that get transported by container, from the mundane to the bizarre, until we get to the depressing, inevitable “Vietnamese refugees” delivered in the same way, one item among many. Sometimes the text segues into questions, sometimes requests (“please, look at my taxidermy frogs!”). These are sometimes sung, sometimes spoken, with differentiation in intonation and emphasis. The five performers scrape at violins and tinker with effects pedals creating a disorientating soundscape, their vocals sometimes harmonious, more often discordant.
This soundscape is occasionally punctuated by whimsical storytelling sections in which two miniature mice are placed in the middle of the stage. For the most part though the piece maintains an opacity. Until, that is, it zeroes in on a specific incident, the horrific discovery in 2015 of the bodies of 71 refugees and migrants from Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan in the back of a lorry on the side of the motorway in Austria. They’d suffocated in the airtight meat truck. Here the text lingers, vividly presenting us with the consequence of a system which prioritises the policing of borders over the preservation of human lives.
Later four of the performers walk off set leaving their microphones switched on so we hear the murmur of their voices from backstage, while Fielden delivers a monologue on scene changes in Shakespeare, before things slip back into the same mode as before, instead of evolving in any substantive way.
It’s a show that clearly clicks with a certain kind of theatre fan, as captured by Frey Kwa Hawking’s loving essay for Exeunt on having seen it seven (!) times in various iterations and in various locations, while some critics have found it frustrating, like glimpsing a show still in the process of being devised (which having read Hawking’s piece is not, I think, wholly inaccurate). It does get a bit on-the nose at times with one member of the chorus chanting “Welcome to my country,” while another voice says “get out of my home.” In a weird way it kind of reminded me of Slovenian director Žiga Dvijak’s The Game, which used testimonies collected by the Border Pushback Monitoring Agency to show how police in the Balkan region regularly use brutal and humiliating methods to drive migrants back out of the EU. That show didn’t use music but a similar kind of belligerent repetition that made you not just understand systemic inequalities and semi-sanctioned cruelty but also, to some extent, feel them.
Personally, I found Container simultaneously mesmeric and a tiny bit frustrating. I adored the precision of delivery, the way the lines landed, the overlap and babble, but found it a little restrained (contained?). I wanted it to embrace cacophony a little more. I found myself thinking of #TORYCORE, Chris Thorpe and Lucy Ellinson’s insanely cathartic collision of Tory austerity policy and death metal (surely we could use a #LABOURCORE round about now?) and how I felt watching that, while admiring the care with which this piece has been made and its willingness to experiment.
This week in European theatre
A round-up of festivals, premieres and other upcoming events over the next seven days
Donation -Canadian actor Arsinée Khanjian and her filmmaker husband Atom Egoyan collaborate on a new show about keeping the memory of the Armenian genocide alive, which has its world premiere on 25 April at Berlin’s Maxim Gorki Theatre as part of a wider festival of work by Armenian artists, including exhibitions films, concerts and performances, taking place between 21 April and 31 May.
Hamlet Hail to the Thief – As a massive Radiohead fan, I am super-intrigued by this prospect of this mash-up of Shakespeare with Radiohead’s 2013 album, Thom Yorke has transformed the album into a score that will be performed live during the performance which has been co-created with Frantic Assembly’s Steven Hoggett and director Christine Jones. Uniting Manchester’s Factory International with the Royal Shakespeare Company, it plays Aviva Studios in Manchester from 27 April.
Lessons on Revolution – Samuel Rees and Gabriele Uboldi’s piece of documentary theatre connecting the 1968 LSE occupation with the place we are now was one of my Edinburgh fringe highlights (here’s my review in The Stage). It’s a show about resistance, change, and how to organise. With protests spreading across the US and Europe, including Serbia’s student-driven protest movement which is very much still ongoing, it’s likely to feel more topical than ever. It’s at Jermyn Street Theatre in London between 28 April – 3 May.
Thanks for reading! If you have any feedback, tips, or thoughts about this newsletter, you can reach me on natasha.tripney@gmail.com
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